Archiving DV, VHS, and 8MM for Later Authoring

[mewalter]

Hi All! I'm getting ready to work "on the road" and would like to archive over 200 hours of home movies to either (data)DVDs or a 250GB Hard Drive. While I'm working away from home I would like to edit the clips and assemble them into cohesive DVDs to "torture" friends & family with for years to come.

The idea is to keep the amount of equipment/media that I have to haul around to a minimum.

I'm using a Sharp VLNZ50U MiniDV as a DV terminal to capture all video. Pinnacle StudioDV ver 1.2.6 saves AVI files that are about 10GB for an hour of analog video. My questions are:

1) What is the best (maximum quality, minimum encoding time, maximum compression) format to archive the videos in (mpg/avi and which codec).

2) What tools can be used on the format recommended in 1) to edit the video clips and author the DVDs.

Any help is greatly appreciated!

[daamon]

Hi mewalter,

1) What is the best (maximum quality, minimum encoding time, maximum compression) format to archive the videos in (mpg/avi and which codec).

I don't know about "the best", but DV AVI -> AVI (Divx) is considered to be minimal (acceptable) loss in quality and (I think) compression to 1/10th the original size.

From numerous comments I've seen on this site, keep your material in AVI. It seems that MPEG is tricky to edit as it often leads to audio being out of synch with video.

2) What tools can be used on the format recommended in 1) to edit the video clips and author the DVDs.

Edit: Look under Advanced and Basic Video Editors in "Tools" - Depends on your budget and how complex the stuff is you wanna do. I use Adobe Premiere, but it's pricey.

Encode: Again, look in the Tools section. Though usual recommendations on this site are either TMPGEnc (which I use), or Cinema Craft Encoder. There are others. If you go for TMPGEnc, I find this guide:

http://dvd-hq.info/Compression.html

...VERY useful for my settings.

I use Min bitrate = 2000, Average = 6000 and Max = 9000 kbps (depends on the audio format you use - WAV (also known as PCM) = 1,536kbps, but you can make WAV -> AC3 / MP2 (negligible loss in quality) @ 192kbps with ffmpeggui. Extract the WAV from the source using VirtualDub). As the max (I believe) on a DVD is 9484kbps.

Author: You guessed, check out the Tools, but a good one for beginners is TMPGEnc DVD Author (I use) and it's fully functional on a 30 day trial - There are others. It burns too (as does Nero 6 and others).

Hope that helps... Good luck.

[SaSi]

A 200Gb external USB2 or firewire disk appears to be the best choice as a video cabinet. Combined with a large (15" or more) panel notebook with sufficient power (P4/2GHz or more) and at least 256Mb of memory would make a good system for portable editing.

To allow for fast editing and no loss in quality, the trick is to choose an editor that doesn't re-encode the video as it saves the edited version. If you delete parts of the video or re-combine portions in different order, the editor can be smart enough not to decode each frame of the source video and re-encode it again using the same codec or a different one.

VirtualDUB is the cheapest (free) editor that can do linear editing (trimming, joining and re-ordering without decode-encode steps. This is what I use as the first step in any capture and in some cases no further steps are needed.

Mainconcept EVE is another fancy and powerful editor that edits smartly. It allows all types of transitions and trimming one would need without resorting to Premier that is both expensive and complex.

To fit 200 hours to 200 Gb you need 1 Gb per hour. The only way to achieve this is with DivX 5.11 using the constant quality compression with a value between 2.0 and 1.0.

Audio should also be encoded (as 1 hour of uncompressed audio at 48khz stereo at 16 bits is roughly 800MB). Use MP3 compression with at least 192kbps. DONT USE VBR ENCODING FOR AUDIO. IT WILL GUARANTEE LOSS OF SYNC WITH VIDEO WHILE EDITING.

For MPEG-2 encoding, I use Mainconcept. v.1.41. It has grown mature and is the fastest encoder of the popular around. The quality is also very good.

For DVD Authoring, I recommend DVDLab. The current version has gotten rid of most of the early bugs and nuissances. The ease of composition and power it has to design complex and eye catching menus and transitions leaves other tools blushing.

For recording, I recomment that you buy a firewire recorder when you have enough material to burn. Don't go for the latest 8X recorders, as the transfer rate you can get from the laptop and the firewire port may not sustain the 8X recording speed.

[mewalter]

Thanks for the quick response!

Definitely sounds like virtualdub is the way to go. I have some experience with it but have never tried to capture video.

I've done some searching but haven't discovered how, or if, virtualdub will capture from DV.

If it will, can I compress via DIVX on the fly? This would save me time and effort from having to capture in DVstudio and then compressing in Virtualdub.

[manco]

Don't get me wrong, I understand what you're try to do (squeeze many hours of video onto one drive), but I've never heard of anyone re-encoding DV to Divx or any other intermediate format for editing before going to DVD. I would advise against using Divx unless you're just planning to do low-quality draft edits, then recut the master DV footage later. Not to mention sync issues you may run into.

In general, you should try to keep re-compression down to a minimum. Re-encoding with multiple codecs and multiple generations can drastically lower picture quality and exacerbate artifacts and inherent weaknesses in lossy compression.

Back in the days before DV, a lot of people used MJPEG as an editing format. It's more flexible in terms of bitrate compared to DV, but it would really be redundant to re-encode DV material into MJPEG.

Morgan M-JPEG codec
PICVideo MJPEG codec

The best choice would be to bring your tapes and DV camera and work on say 10-15 hours of footage at a time. DV is a format designed for editing.

Another DVD authoring package to look at (in addition to DVDlab and TMPGEnc DVD Author) :

Ulead DVD MovieFactory or Workshop

[vhelp]

.
.
Not to bust in here singing the same old song :P :P

But, if you REALLY wanted the best method (as your post subj is aiming for)
than I would factor in a tripod in your drive. I'm assuming you mean that
you will be taking varous footage during your jorney :P If that is the case,
of course.
.
.
Now, if that is so, then I would definately think about a tripod (TP)

Ok, so what does a TP have to do w/ "archiving" and "best quality" ??
Easy. If you don't use one, then all those hand shots will have dramatic
human errors (shaky movements) that will JACK up your bitrate (and even
that might night help) and if you archive this to another codec (ie, divX) then
you'll suffer in the end w/ a quality hit, because of the human movements
that envolved countless errors (shakes) during hand footage. So, don't
discount this important tip. I've ben there (and still doing it) and it all really
does count on the quality.
.
.
In fact, I now have a gizmo that I added to my list of "quality improment"
I have a motorized panning unit that mounts my DV cam to my tripod and
provides up/down/left/right motion. But, all in perfectly SMOOOOTH motion.
And, because of this, my encodes have a Cinema quality to it (well, not
Hollywood's) but clsoe enough for my home-budgeting expectations :P

-vhelp

[Sparkplus]

Agree about the tripod.

200hrs video at 10G/hr (I belive it is 13G/hr miniDV)=2000G
(I stay away from editing Mpeg it is hard to achive good results)

200hrs video / 2hrs video/DVD (quality?)=100 discs
(there are real time compression codecs to Mpeg like mainconcept
you can try it)

if you are going to capture, edit, compression, author and burn (not to mention shooting) consider the available man/hr , computer and camera/hrs.

Correct me if I am wrong,
I am learning too,